I strongly believe that a university teacher should adopt more measures of encouragement rather than holding on to a whip for the most part of his education journey with his students. Surely encouragement and so-called tough love don’t necessarily contradict each other: one can be the other in disguise, and a combination of both styles may generate better effects than going one road exclusively. Yet encouragement is more what contemporary university students need in most cases.
In my personal experience and according to my observation of people around me, modern pupils don’t lack criticism but want confidence. I remember growing up even as a modal pupil at school, what I got from teachers and my parents were mostly a slap on the wrist when I made a mistake, and the reaction produced in me was almost never a motion forward but discouragement. I see the same tendency in my fellow students then and my real students now as I am a teacher myself. I heard from a famous philosopher that what motivates people the most was never to pursue happiness but to rid themselves of pain. While encouragement gives a gentle push for the student to move forward in his origianl progressive path, criticism unavoidably brings pain into people’s heart and immediately their instincts tend to be self defense because they instinctively focus on getting rid of the pain of being blamed.
No doubt that criticism serve to put students quickly in the right place if they are conceited or need to be forcefully steered to look at their shortcomings. The old quote “Strict teachers bring forth master students” is not invalid but it has two hidden premises: that the teacher and student form a permanent, at least long-term pair of mentor and mentee, and that the goal of that education process in question is to train top-notch students, as opposed to general education goals. However, in modern times, the relationships between students and teachers are often not much more than terminals of information output and input. In this case, the so-called love in “tough love” requires more interactions than existing to build up, henceforth all is left is toughness which produces pain only. Pain should never be the goal.
(moderations, conditions). Provided that teachers go for the encouragement way as the main road, they can tailor their education strategies by adding some spices of critiquing based on their understanding and assessment of their students’ psychological characteristics. After all, students can be lazy or stubborn in readying themselves to find the critical faults that will stumble their further progress. Then teachers might resort to stronger words to strap them up and get them in the right place first. But such measures should not be predominant as we all respond to positive incentives better than negative ones.
Teachers’ objective being to have the best possible education outcome, namely, to train their students to become as skilled and capable as possible in the subject in question, they should always choose the method that can carry their students onward rather than put them down. Having said that, there are stituation and personality variations that call for more “harshful” attitudes to stop catastrophic momentums, in another word, we need both the gas and the break peda albeit in different proportionsl. The application of different methods in education should be done according to what the students truly need at the time.
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